


Golden Repair

by thedastardly



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: M/M, Mentions of Blood, Mentions of Death, writer knows about as much about classics as a rock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 01:24:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4687142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedastardly/pseuds/thedastardly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richard studies the pottery in the Japanese selection carefully. The placard reads Kintsugi and the pots are veined with lines of gold. Some of them are so veiny that Richard thinks momentarily of the light angel veins around one’s heart. He wonders if these pots are living breathing things.</p><p>He does not know why he is reminded of Henry when he studies the pottery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Golden Repair

Richard remembers seeing the pottery exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art when he lived in New York City for the short time after everything at Hampden, everything at the Ablemarle. He had ridden the subway to the gallery, his forehead pressed against cool glass. Someone was playing a violin when he had gotten off at his stop. 

There was an exhibit on Oriental art and Richard spent the day wandering around aimlessly, viewing pottery from China that was older than anything he had ever seen before. He could not claim he was especially paying attention to anything he saw. There was still a hole in his stomach that gave him trouble when he did anything too strenuous. 

Still, wandering the quiet halls of the MoMA gave him a sort of quieted mind that reminded him of times in Hampden. He remembered the way the campus had looked when it was blanketed white with pristine snow, the eerie quiet of the woods around the school after the search parties had left. He remembered most the silence of Henry’s house before Bunny’s death, before his return from Rome. When he was sick and sleeping on Henry’s cool white sheets. His house had been quiet, almost unnaturally so. The only exception was sometimes the sound of footsteps in the night, outside his door, soft as a cat paws padding along. Richard was sure he dreamed that though, sitting up in a daze to listen, and hearing nothing. Now, he is unsure of everything.

Richard studies the pottery in the Japanese selection carefully. The placard reads _Kintsugi_ and the pots are veined with lines of gold. Some of them are so veiny that Richard thinks momentarily of the light angel veins around one’s heart. He wonders if these pots are living breathing things.

He does not know why he is reminded of Henry when he studies the pottery. 

The history is detailed in a few words on the placard next to the pottery, and he reads the words over and over again, searching for a sign that will tell him why the man had sprung up at this, of all junctures.

Richard’s face is pressed almost against the glass, his breath fogging it up, when he remembers Henry telling him about _Kintsugi_. The memory is from the winter when he was sick and they had been sitting together on the couch. There was a snow falling outside, Richard remembers, and the sky was gray; he was peering at the words in his book with only the oil lamp to illuminate it. Henry had turned to him, serious and serene (always, a blank slate ready to be impressed upon) and showed him a photograph.

 _Golden repair_ , he had said as he turned to show him in the page. _Idealistic, at best. They say it adds to the history of the object. It does not disguise._

He had smirked then, and closed the book swiftly before laying it on the table next to him. Then, he had drawn a lucky strike from his pack and tapped it against the heel of his hand. Richard remembers as he turned a light had caught on his glasses, reflecting bright for the briefest of moments.

Richard steps onto the New York streets and into a flurry of snow half an hour later, wondering what Henry had meant by _'It does not disguise'_.

*

There is hot shame welling up inside Richard at the fact that he is thinking of Henry like this - a fantasy he has only recently indulged in - kissing him, touching him. He thinks of his big, square hands, clean nails and the pink lines they would leave when raked over Richard’s own white skin. He is masturbating in the studio bedroom in Brooklyn. 

Someone else's sheets, someone else's life.

Richard’s hand fists the sheets as he brings himself off, imagining Henry’s mouth hot and sinister against his own, biting his lips until he can taste blood. He wonders what it’s supposed to mean when he thinks he can smell the cigarette smoke, the soft and wet earth from Henry’s garden. When he feels like he can feel Henry’s body, strong and hard over his own. He half expects to open his eyes and see him there, glasses askew, breathing hard and damp over his collarbone and neck, as his fingers trace ghostly lines around the pink scar on Richard’s abdomen.

Richard bites off a curse when he comes, hot and wet over his fingers. He thinks of the blood splashing over his hands from the gunshot, briefly. Then, he lays in the dark of the studio apartment and shivers slightly before he absently sucks his own come off his fingers. Silence settles and there comes a moment when he feels he is not alone in the room. Richard stiffens and shifts his gaze toward a potted plant, holding his breath and watching the leaves move gently in the airless room.

*

One night Richard dreams that Henry is in the apartment watering the plants with his own watering can from his garden. He’s even wearing his old gardening clothes again, his suspenders a large, black X across his back. Richard had always thought Henry looked lovely in his garden. Even when he was angry at him, near the end. 

When he turns to look at him from where he is laying on the bed he realizes there is gold liquid dripping down the side of his face from the gunshot wound. When Richard moves there is gold liquid on the bed from his stomach. When he wakes he remembers the way the blood and viscera had oozed from Henry’s head, the blood spatter on the mirror. The slow motion way Henry had pulled the trigger, twice. Richard runs to the kitchen to vomit in the sink.

After, Richard settles back into bed and closes his eyes but does not sleep. He knows, in this lifetime or the next, it’s not the only dream he’ll ever have about Henry but knows that he will never see Henry whole again. Can anyone forget the crack in the tea cup before they had sealed it with gold? It’s strange, he thinks, that he never dreams of Bunny anymore. It’s almost as if Henry’s broken pieces have been repaired, obscuring the old history, bringing a new history to life.

*

Richard reads a lot in the days he spends in Brooklyn, especially when he cannot sleep. One night he re-reads about the death of Patroclus and how Achilles had burned him at a pyre before gathering his bones in a golden urn. He wonders about how much the bones of his lover weighed in that solid gold urn. Heavy in Achilles palms when he gripped the edges and saw nothing left. 

Richard does not think that Henry’s mother had Henry cremated. Even if she did, he would not have been put into a golden urn. 

Richard finally falls asleep on his work and wakes to the stars shining over head. He remembers Julian’s words about ghosts being starlight. He thinks about how strange it is that he’s not with his friends. That Henry’s gone. That Henry is a constellation above him. Light filtering through the atmosphere from a far off place. Somewhere they will never touch.

He thinks he dreamed of him again, walking him through the Byzantine Chrysotriklinos’ golden halls. He remembers Henry, tall with dark hair and those striking blue eyes, stopping to show him something, an urn maybe, glittering blinding yellow-white in sunlight that he cannot find the source of and the smell of raspberries before he wakes.

*

“Was Henry interested in Japanese philosophy?” Richard asks Francis on one of their few meet-ups in the city. They are in a bar below Francis’s mother’s apartment in Manhattan and Richard does not mind. There are few people there but it seems to Richard that Francis knows almost all of them, even when they are sitting alone at one end of the bar. He is glad to see Francis who, to him, had always seemed to be logical. A true thinker.

Richard misses Camilla very much, something that Francis shares. Honestly, he doesn’t think he will stop missing Camilla. Francis doesn’t mention Charles, and Richard decides it would be stupid to mention him as well. Deep inside himself he feels like he wouldn’t be angry at Charles if he saw him right then. If the twins strolled in and they all started chatting like old times. He would be hard pressed not to return to a natural habit. He imagines Henry, momentarily, coming into the bar and sitting next to him, laying his book on the bar and ordering a whiskey. 

“Henry was interested in everything,” Francis says as he orders another set of whiskeys for them. He screws up his face after he says it like he’s thinking. “He was interested in most things, I suppose, I should say.”

“I feel like he showed me something once; Kintsugi,” Richard explains. He wonders if he dreamed that too. Henry explaining the pottery to him, smirking and lighting a cigarette in that way he does. If he did dream it Richard thinks the natural progression should have been to the sex (Henry’s hands on his hips, his throat, nipping his way into his mouth) because it is all he has thought about lately. Except that did not happen. The memory had seemed genuine.

 _Is fucking a ghost the only way you can tell if you’re dreaming or not?_ he thinks sourly, at himself. 

“I don’t speak Japanese,” Francis shrugs and lights a cigarette. He says he is going to cut back but he has only waited about ten minutes between putting his last one out and lighting this one up. 

Richard does not mind. He studies Francis’s profile in the dim bar light. He’s still handsome, if a little exhausted-looking. He was always such a normal person and said about as much before, it seems, Henry dug his hooks into them all. His sharp nose and pale skin continue to be his most striking features. Richard studies him, wordlessly for a long time and sees he has a mole on his ear that he’s never noticed before. Suddenly, he wonders how it would taste.

*

Richard manages to buy some blow from a man that Judy Poovey, after a very long phone conversation, assures him is on the up and up. Francis is sitting in the car reading the manual and waiting for him when he comes back. Typically, Francis had said, he would not go very far from home, that leaving made him anxious and like he was having a heart attack. 

Richard feels a certain pride well up in him when Francis agrees to go back to the Brooklyn studio with him. 

“I’ve never done blow before,” He says as Richard puts the car into drive. It’s Henry’s BMW and something about having Francis in the car with him makes him hyper aware of the fact that he is driving Henry’s old car. Francis, if he notices or cares, does not comment on it.

“Huh,” Richard says, genuinely bemused by the admission. “Well, you only live once.”

*

Richard and Francis do only a little of the coke before Francis leans over and kisses him on the mouth, open and wet. Then, he moves and kisses along his jaw, softer now. His hand is resting on Richard’s thigh, lightly; almost as an afterthought.

“It’s just because I’m here, right?” Richard says as he returns the kisses, the affection. His hand slides under Francis’s shirt and spreads along his ribs. He thumbs at his nipple and delights for a moment in the sound of his breath catching in his throat.

“Sure,” Francis shrugs again. “You’re here.”

Richard thinks there is a slight desperation in that, on both their parts. Francis is here too, though, and he will not deny that. He does not want to lead him on, but he has not stopped jerking off by himself in the dark for a few days now. It has become tiresome. He does not want to be alone with his thoughts of Henry again, if he’s completely honest. He also misses human contact and has abstained from people for a while. It seems he has a jumble of reasons to sleep with Francis but, if he is honest, none of them seem fair to Francis. And still, they climb into bed together. 

Francis is good in bed, Richard thinks. He is efficient and enthusiastic. He allows Richard to top him because it’s his first time with a man. He wonders if he should say thank you when they’ve finished. Richard likes Francis a lot but cannot say it, for some reason. Maybe because he is not in love with him. He wants to be. He wants to mend Francis and his lives with gold filling spread along seams and cracks. 

“Do you think about Henry a lot?” Francis asks in the dark. Richard watches him retrieve a cigarette from the pack before he moves closer, shifting over onto his side to talk to him. There is a little light coming in through the balcony doors, illuminating a dull halo around Francis’s red hair. The tip of his cigarette is glowing the same color as his hair, leaving streaks of orange across Richard’s vision. His thin body is covered by the sheet. Someone else’s sheets, someone else's life.

Richard is not sure what to say. He does and he does not. He won’t be thinking about Henry for days or even hours and then suddenly he will look over and see him at the breakfast nook, cleaning the leaves of a potted plant. Richard has broken more cups from these moments than he cares to admit. And he cannot mend them.

He feels haunted. 

Richard turns over on his side too. “I guess,” he admits. “He was important to me. To all of us.”

“He liked you a lot,” Francis says, and pushes Richard’s hair behind his ear affectionately. 

“I think you’ve told me that before,” Richard allows. He wonders about things that happened - about Cloke’s story of Henry turning his name over to the FBI, about Henry’s trail of breadcrumbs. Richard feels like he had fallen into every web that Henry laid for him and still he finds the words stuck in his head along with the specters of his friend, smirking knowingly from beyond the grave. He leans forward and kisses Francis again. He does not say what he is thinking. Does not say, _I loved him. I know that now_.

*

One day, closer to his return to Hampden for his new term, Richard goes out and buys a potted fern from a nursery and brings it back to the apartment. He re-pots it and waters it carefully before he sets it on the balcony for sunlight. 

He sits at the desk by the window and watches the wind rustle the leaves of the plant. He thinks of Henry, smirking, smoking, achingly handsome and saying with cold demeanor:

 _I prefer to think of it as ‘redistribution of matter’_.

Richard thinks that is why he showed him the pottery, gold filled and reassembled. Maybe that’s why he kept the ferns from the day he pushed Bunny - matter, changed and remade into something new. Maybe he thought of those ferns as gold filled pottery. Plants made from Bunny. He had cared for them there, by his house, their history a part of a tragedy. They were the same ferns but they were also new, remade, no mistakes, just a new plant for Henry’s garden.

Richard remembers reading somewhere that ferns are a symbol of a secret bond and he thinks that means something too. 

He thinks that Henry will always kept fragments of himself embedded in their lives, but they will not be able to bring them all back together. There is not enough gold in the world to mend his small group of friends.

Despite this, Richard knows that this secret bond is all he has to remember them by now. He has nothing else to tell. Henry will come to him in dreams again, he knows, and remind him that he reassembled him, personally, individually, in his image. Cracks filled in and repaired with gold.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to my wife for the beta and to betty for cheerleading. you may notice that i have very little in the way of classics beyonds my high school readings of greek myth and watching the Iliad. thanks for reading anyway!


End file.
